Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2011

There is a pattern that repeats in the working lives of everyone who regularly makes money, from my wife to my parents and sisters, to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, people who play around on the stock market, even professional sports bettors.

Now, if I write about a pattern that repeats in the activities of successful people, it may seem as if I am a master of these types of insights. Don’t let yourself be fooled. The situation is in fact quite absurd.

It’s like someone who says: “The apple is green.” Then you say: “I know. The apple is green.” Then the other guy slaps you across the face. As you’re gathering your senses, he again says: “The apple is green.” Again, you reply: “I know. The apple is green.” Again he slaps you. This time he adds: “You don’t really know. You think you know, but you don’t. Not really.” Then he repeats the sentence: “The apple is green.” This time you’re a bit more careful, so you say it softer. “Yes, I know: The apple is …” Slap!

So it continues for a few minutes. Eventually the guy again tells you: “You say it, and you think you know. But you don’t truly realise what you are saying. The apple … is green.”

By now, your cheeks have been slapped a deep pink, and you are absolutely convinced that the guy must surely have a point. Then you think about what he is saying. You really think about it. You are quiet for a few minutes, and you think. Then it hits you: “The fucking apple is green.”

So it was with me. I’ve been speculating for a long time about why I don’t make more money than the few bucks I earn every week by teaching two or three English classes, even though I try so hard, even though I work on so many projects, even though I have learned so much about so many topics, and even though I have learned so many skills.

I have also wondered about other people who make money – the woman in my life, my family, my friends … What are they doing that is so right that I am doing wrong?

Yet, I know what the answer is. I knew the answer this morning too, but I didn’t truly realise until tonight: The Great Secret. The Reason Why I Haven’t Made More Money The Past Five Years. The Key To Success.

My wife goes to a language centre on a Monday afternoon where she teaches for about seven hours. Tuesday she does it again. Wednesday she does it again. Thursday and Friday too.

Warren Buffett did not make his fortune with one good buying-and-selling of stock thirty or forty years ago. He does it all the time. He repeats the same thing over and over and over again.

Professional sports bettor Ian Erskine doesn’t make £50,000 a year because he wins a few lucky bets every now and then. He analyses dozens of soccer matches every week. He places dozens of bets every month. Over and over and over. Month after month, year after year.

My older sister makes money because she applies account management to companies’ financial affairs. She doesn’t perform only one task per year, she does hundreds. Over and over – the same, or similar tasks. Month in and month out. Year after year.

REPETITION. OF SOMETHING THAT WORKS. OF SOMETHING THAT MAKES MONEY.

Every month that had passed since January 2006 when I failed to make enough money, or when I would have liked to make more money, have seen the exact same pattern repeat: I either did the wrong thing – wrong market, wrong method, wrong project, unworkable way of making money, or when I did the right thing, I didn’t do enough of it.

At one point, I researched some products, wrote reviews about them, and then published the reviews in a few places, with my affiliate link below the text, so when someone clicked on it and purchased the product, I earned a commission. It worked! I made some money doing it. But I only did it with six or seven products! And I only published the reviews in a few places! I should have written seventy, or a hundred reviews! I should have published the reviews in ten, fifteen places! Three or four links to a review site? It should have been three hundred links! And the next year I should have done another hundred or two hundred reviews, and I should have published those reviews in twenty or thirty places.

I have made money by selling bundles with so-called private label articles – text that other people can edit and publish under their own names. How many bundles did I make available? Ten or twelve. It should have been two hundred … no, five hundred bundles! The one or two sales I did get with a dozen bundles would then have repeated – sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale …

I have made money rewriting private label articles so that they were a bit more original. Okay, it was excruciatingly boring, but I made money with it pretty quickly! Can I deny that I would have made more and more money if I had repeated the process, and then again, and again, and again, and again and again and again?

I have also made money by making websites for people. How many websites? Two or three. Two or three? It should have been fifty or sixty! And the following year a hundred! “Jim Buyer just sent you money …”  the e-mail from PayPal would have said. Then another one. Then another one. Then one more. And another. Another one. Another one. Another one. Another one.

A few months ago, after reading in an e-book how to do it, I sold a domain name that I owned. Exactly like the book explained. How many domain names did I sell? One. How many did I try to sell that way? Two or three.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I am not working on the wrong projects at the moment. What I do can be done better, and improvements will be made. But what I am doing is quite good enough to make money. I am just not doing enough of it.

REPEAT. AGAIN. MORE. AGAIN. REPEAT. ANOTHER TEN TIMES. ANOTHER FIFTY TIMES. ANOTHER FIVE TIMES. AGAIN. REPEAT. ANOTHER TEN TIMES. ANOTHER FIVE TIMES. FIFTY MORE.

* * *

What is outsourcing? It is about getting more done of something that works.

* * *

“I’m not making money with this.”

“Does what you do make sense? Do other people make money with it?”

“It makes sense, and other people make money with it.”

“Then it’s because you’re not doing enough of it. If you’re trying to sell something, you’re not repeating something enough times to bring it to the attention of enough people. Either you are doing something wrong, or if you’re doing the right thing, you’re not doing enough of it.”

TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2011

Ideas and initiative can’t be outsourced. Just about all the rest can. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t sweat doing work that you can pay other people to do.

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TUESDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 2011

My whole adult life I’ve been thinking of myself as a young man – after all, I don’t know what it’s like to be old. But then one day you’re confronted with the realisation that there are other young men as much as twenty years younger than you.

“Twenty years!” you cry out. “Twenty years?!”

And to top it all of you have to remind yourself that you can learn something from these youngsters any day of the week – that a guy of 20 or 25 can also sit on a rock for an hour or so and then rise with a piece of wisdom or good advice ready to share with the nearest bystander.

At the end of the day it’s just vanity, and pathological insecurity about your own value that makes you want to hold on to time, that makes you panic when you think of time slipping through your fingers day after day – like it does through everyone’s fingers.

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WEDNESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2011

“You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.” WH Auden (1907-1973)

* * *

Self-confidence and enthusiasm are my greatest assets.

Self-confidence and enthusiasm are my biggest enemy.

MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2011

For weeks I’ll think I can – and will – do something.

Then, suddenly, I hit a brick wall.

Back to the pieces of paper. Back to the lists … And the recognition of the fact that, not for the first time, I got caught up in excessive self-confidence, and too much enthusiasm.

* * *

First you ask:

What can I do to make money?

After learning a thing or two about making money, you ask …

What need, problem or interest do people have where I can deliver a product or a solution?

There is, of course, a third question:

Once you’ve come up with a product for which there is a market, how do you bring it to the attention of enough of the right people?

If you cannot answer this third question, it won’t help you much if you had a hungry market ready to buy every little thing you can produce. If they don’t know your product exists, you won’t make a red cent.

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MONDAY, 15 AUGUST 2011

The RT Mart is now selling a “UK Design” bicycle for NT$ 2,074 [US$70]. I’ve been saying for months that I’ll wait until my bike has completely disintegrated before buying a new one. A few points on this topic:

1. If that is my position, I should have started looking around for a new bike three months ago. One of the inner tubes had a puncture, both front and back tires were worn out, the brakes had stopped working properly, and the bike creaked and moaned as only a piece of metal can that should have come to rest in a junkyard ten years ago. What I did, of course, was to fix everything.

2. A bicycle rarely stops working like a computer or a computer monitor. A computer works fine one day, then the next day it’s nothing but ones and zeroes and lights flashing and screens freezing. Then you take it to the computer store, where the technician informs you that you might just as well buy a new computer. Same with a computer monitor: first some flickering, then poof. A bicycle, on the other hand, breaks. Then you identify the problem (usually fairly obvious), and you either fix it yourself or you pay someone to do it for you. Then it’s good for another few weeks. If you wait until a bicycle has completely exhausted its natural life, you may have to wait a long time. (For the record, my previous bicycle had indeed achieved that status. It was duly replaced with the current bike which was about twenty years older than the previous one.)

3. At the RT Mart there are also bicycles for NT$3,500 and as high as NT$5,000 – and then you’d have to leave the bicycle section at the supermarket for a proper bike shop where you can expect to pay between five and ten times as much for bikes that are between ten and twenty times better quality. Nevertheless, why not just go for the NT$4,000 bike rather than the NT$2,074 “UK Design”? Because, as I see it, all the supermarket bicycles are equally fragile. A cable will inevitably snap within a few months anyways. The seat will probably fall off within six months. The frame will probably buckle, the brakes will stop working, and the gears will slide graciously from slow to fast and back again for only about two weeks before it gets stuck in tenth gear. So, whether it’s NT$2,074 or NT$4,250, it’s not NT$25,000 or NT$49,500.

4. It would be better to retire my current granny-style bicycle now. That way I’ll know I’d be able to air up the tires any time in the future, when circumstances require, get on it and again ride like the wind – if the wind is blowing strong enough that day.

That’s it, then. I’m buying a new bike before the end of the month.

And at NT$2,074 I can even afford to reward the old Black Peril for good service with a new seat before giving her some space in the back room.

——————

Update: It actually took me another nine months before I forked out NT$2,500 for an exact copy of my old bike, but at least brand new.

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WEDNESDAY, 3 AUGUST 2011

During my recent visit to South Africa, I discovered (or rediscovered) two guides that can teach me a lot about making money: My own mother, and my friend Gerald G.

Both earn full-time incomes, and they even contribute to other people’s incomes, by marketing their own ideas and projects.

I could probably organise both their businesses more efficiently, because, as I’ve discovered, the process is sometimes chaotic, they don’t always know whether they can really do what they say they can do, and their administration sometimes leaves much to be desired.

But, they make money.

Every month.

MONDAY, 8 AUGUST 2011

Two reasons why I got up every morning, years ago in the blackest days of teaching English, and did what I had to do:

1. I didn’t want to get into trouble. I had entered into agreements with schools and/or businesses to perform a certain task. If I had failed to pitch up for work, I would have had to explain my absence.

2. I knew if I did pitch up and did the work to which I had agreed, I received money – a specific amount on a pre-arranged day and time – that I could use in a variety of pleasant ways.

Motivation is sometimes a problem for me. I admit it. It will be irresponsible not to acknowledge this. It would be foolish not to consider it as something I should pay attention to on a daily basis.

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